Reviews: Pohl, Carol

Jupiter —
Carol Pohl & Frederik Pohl

The
1960s and 1970s were an exciting time for science and SF. Robotic
probes had given humanity its first close up look at the worlds of
our solar system: Lunar farside in 1959, Venus in 1962, Mars in 1965,
Jupiter in 1973, Mercury in 1974 and Saturn in 1979 (the other worlds
would have to wait until the 1980s). The flood of increasingly
detailed information about the worlds of our solar system gave rise
to a short-lived genre, one that it existed in the tension between
how SF had imagined the neighbour worlds to be and what our space
probes were revealing.

Carol
and Frederik Pohl’s 1973 anthology, Jupiter,
is perhaps my favourite exemplar of that mayfly genre. It is filled
with classic SF stories, most of which had been published between the
1930s and the 1950s (1971’s “A Meeting with Medusa” is the
outlier). All these stories doomed to obsolescence thanks to human
ingenuity [1]. However, they still make good reading, for the most part.